All you need to know about measuring your startup’s PR campaigns

When a company runs a PR campaign, it invests a considerable amount of money and effort into it. It is therefore important to measure the success of that campaign. Evaluating its effectiveness and impact will also help you identify the loopholes, which you can use to improve your future campaigns.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a specific method solely for calculating an impact of a PR campaign, and this is why digital marketers use different metrics.

But here are the ones you need to consider:

• Sales statistics
• Social media reach
• Engagement on social media
• Media impressions
• Brand mentions
• Keyword rankings
• Social shares
• Website traffic
• Number of backlinks
• Lead generation

The data for these variables needs to be collected before the campaign starts and then compared with the end results to find out how successful your campaign did.

Here’s how to use each metric:

Sales

For a product-based or B2C company, sales is the most important factor. While PR may not give an instant boost to sales, it will certainly cause some changes. In fact, a well-executed digital PR campaign can generate significant sales over time. If there is no change in sales, you will need to audit your strategy again.

Factors to consider when measuring sales

Look at the socioeconomic factors that possibly affect your sales.

Location or territory

• Calculating the changes in sales volume using location or territory allows you to identify new sales opportunities.
• Revise your PR strategy in areas where sales figures didn’t show a positive change.
• Focus marketing and sales efforts on lucrative locations.

Social media reach 

Engagement on social media

Media impressions

Brand mentions on blogs and social media

Number of times PR content was shared

Increase in web traffic

Number of backlinks generated

Improvement in keyword rankings

Improvement in lead generation

Conclusion